Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (29 page)

The Gramatica Word
out
was in
The Eschata
’s glossary It’s a four-syllable Gramatica Word, and I’ve only ever managed three-syllable Words, but you have to start someplace. With an Inhibitory Catalyst, I could make my fear work for me rather than against me, use it to Amplify the Gramatica, use the Amplified Word to Charge a Location Sigil, and then use
that
to jump myself out of this blasted oubliette. Tiny Doom had said that Georgiana Segunda had been buried with the
Diario.
From my previous visit to Bilskinir, I knew that the Haðraaða dead are kept in a crypt deep in Bilskinir’s depths. If I could jump directly from the oubliette to the Cloakroom of the Abyss, as the crypt is called, I could grab the
Diario
and escape Bilskinir before the band finished playing. Then find Nini Mo. She’d know what to do from there, how to get me home again.

The other option was to sit in the oubliette for the next twenty-three years. Translocation Sigils are extremely dangerous. Done wrong you could easily end up stuck inside a wall or, even worse, half stuck inside a wall. Or even worse than that, half merged with another person: four legs, four arms, two heads.

But if you don’t try, you are bound to fail for sure,
said Nini Mo.
She
wouldn’t sit in an oubliette for twenty-three years.

The claustrophobic darkness lurking just beyond the flickering, fading light of my lantern, its candle already down to a stub; the creeping fear that Paimon might come back for a snack; the skin-crawling horror of that headless carcass on the meat hook—as far as an Inhibitory Catalyst went, I was more than halfway there.

I fished my notebook out of my pack, and a pencil, too, which I sharpened with my little penknife, then wrote
The Cloakroom of the Abyss
over and over and over again until the paper was covered with an unreadable scrawling pattern. A powerful adept, of course, doesn’t need a physical object to use as a focal point of her sigil, but I am not a powerful adept, and I wanted to be sure to get where I wanted to go. After I folded the paper into a small arrow shape, the signifier of a Direction Sigil, I was ready.

I blew out the light, and the darkness oozed around me, as thick as mud and almost as stifling. I crouched down, clutching the Sigil, and allowed my imagination to run free into horrible scary thoughts, and it didn’t take much, let me tell you, to get me lathered. I have a
very
vivid imagination. All I had to do was think about Paimon’s sharp teeth and the row of sharp shiny knives hanging in his spotless kitchen, and I began to shake.

My imagination had help, too. The darkness that surrounded me felt not ordinary pitch-black, but thick and old, as though years without the leavening of light had soured it and congealed it down, like when you leave the coffee pot on the stove and come back to find mud where your espresso should be. Sluggish and tired, but still with a spark of life—and curiosity. Although I knew perfectly well there was no wind, the dark seemed to move about me, stirring my hair and caressing my face with airy fingers.

Whispering voices surrounded me, and I knew that the darkness now stretched around me endlessly. It was an enormous Void full of horrible, hungry things, drawn to me like a moth to the flame, looking for tender young flesh, tender young Will, to snack upon. Chittering sounds, inhuman and diabolical. Claustrophobia bore down on me, the weight of the darkness crushing me. I have no idea how long I sat there, gasping for breath. An hour, a day, an eternity of darkness, with the grasping greedy creatures of the Abyss getting closer and closer. Something brushed my hair. I began to hyperventilate; I couldn’t breathe; panic overwhelmed me and I let out an enormously huge shriek, then another and another.

In my fist, my sweaty grip had condensed the Sigil into a little ball, which was now glowing with coldfire flare. The heat of it spread slowly up my arm, into my body, down my legs, up my chest, until it reached my head and exploded into a giant pulsing ball of staticky pressure. Now was the time.

I shouted.

The world shifted sideways, then whirled like a merry-go-round. For a moment, all my organs seemed to scramble and jump inside my skin, which was prickling and stinging as though I were engulfed in a cloud of extremely hungry mosquitoes.

I felt myself rise, and then drop. I landed hard, the impact shooting all the air out of my lungs and momentarily stunning me. I gurgled, lungs inflating, gasping. When I opened my eyes, I saw I was still in the oubliette.

When I tried to turn my head, I couldn’t—my hair was caught on something. I reached up, and when I realized why I was stuck, I had to fight down the urge to upchuck. The Sigil had worked after all ... partially.

The hair on the left side of my head was now embedded in the wall.

S
TILL FEELING QUEASY
over my close call, I used my knife to cut my hair free. Needless to say, I was not going to attempt that trick again, though now my fear was such that an Inhibitory Catalyst would be mighty easy indeed. At least I had only lost hair. I could have lost a finger, or a hand—or worse.

Twenty-three years wasn’t that long, was it? I wouldn’t even be forty. Or I could try to persuade Paimon to free me the next time he visited me. I could take a nap and maybe I’d have another idea. Or I could just give up, curl into a little ball, and cry—

“Are you still down there, Flora?” a voice shouted hollowly.

High above me, Tiny Doom was backlit by a sputtering lantern. Something twisty fell down and almost whacked me on the head: Pig, with a rope tied around his waist.

I grabbed at him as he swung; he felt soft and cuddly in my arms. “What do you want?” I hollered back. “Come to gloat over your treachery?”

“Don’t be a fiking snapperhead. I hope you are good at rope climbing, because I couldn’t smuggle a ladder in. Come on, chop-chop ... I can only confuse Paimon for so long.”

Now, I didn’t trust Tiny Doom further than I could kick her (and oh, how I would like to kick her), but I wasn’t going to stay down in this oubliette just to spite her, either. I would let her help me escape the oubliette and then I’d escape her.

“I can’t climb and carry Pig, too!” I shouted.

“Never mind Pig, he’ll bring himself up. Come on, hurry!”

When finally I hauled my puffing self over the edge, Tiny Doom announced, “If we’d been under fire, I’d probably be dead and you sure as fike would be. You fiking took long enough.”

“I wouldn’t have been down there in the first place if it hadn’t been for you, pernicious traitor!” I gasped, rubbing my burning hands over my thighs.

“You didn’t think I was going to leave you to Paimon, did you?” Tiny Doom sounded surprised. She’d changed into a supercool fringed buckskin jacket and a black leather kilt. Black paint was smeared on her face, obscuring her bruises and making her eyes look as bright as blue coals. A black knit cap had been pulled over her tricolor hair. “Here—I brought you some boots.”

I caught the boots she tossed at me: purple, with jet buttons and sharp silver spurs. They were supercute, but they were not going to distract me from my ire. “You told him it was all my fault! What else was I supposed to believe? Paimon almost ate me!”

“Oh, Paimon wasn’t really going to eat you—he’s a vegetarian. I’m sorry about putting the juice on you, but we couldn’t both be caught, could we? Who would rescue us both? I had to put Hardhands off the track somehow. I can’t believe you thought I was really trying to do you in.” She looked wounded.

“What else was I supposed to believe?” I sat down on a large crate marked
CRAYFISH
and put the boots on.

“Rangers are supposed to trust each other,” she said, and a tiny feeling of badness began to wiggle inside me, for she was right, of course. Rangers do trust each other. And while I would have rather rescued myself than have been rescued by her,
It doesn’t matter who rescues you, as long as you are rescued,
Nini Mo said.

“Sorry,” I said. “But you sounded pretty sincere.”

“Well, I had to, didn’t I? To make them believe me. If Hardhands had thought I was lying, we’d both have been totally fiked. Anyway, I’m sorry it took so long to get down to rescue you. I had to go downstairs with Hardhands and make fiking nice-nice, and as soon as the Tygers started their show, I came down to get you. Hey—what happened to your hair?”

“I had an accident,” I hedged. I didn’t really want to admit my failure to her.

“What kind of accident?” She sniffed. “You smell of a Catalyst. What happened?”

“I tried to use an Inhibitory Catalyst to Amplify a Directional Sigil into a Translocation Sigil.”

“Are you fiking me? That’s one of the most dangerous Sigils ever. You could have ended up embedded in a wall somewhere.”

“Well, it almost worked. I did translocate a little. But I must have said the Word wrong.”

“That’s a hard one; it’s got that weird click in it. Still, you gotta lot of fiking nerve, Flora. I don’t know if I would try that one, no matter how fiked I was. You are crazy—and I mean that nicely Come on, let’s get a move on; I’m freezing, and the Tygers are into their second set—they’ll be done soon. We gotta get the
Diario
and get the fike out of here.” Tiny Doom stowed Pig in her knapsack, and I followed her to the door of the meat locker.

“The door’s locked,” I said, rattling the handle.

“Ayah, so, but I have the key! See?”

After fishing in her cuff-pocket, Tiny Doom displayed a small porcelain jar, the kind that tooth powder comes in. In fact, it was a tooth-powder jar;
MADAMA TWANKY’S OLD JUBILEE TOOTH POLISH,
it said on the lid in black letters.
Give Your Teeth the Old Hurrah!
Mamma’s favorite brand, but I think it tastes like cod oil, plus it burns your gums.

She unscrewed the lid, then shook the jar out over her palm. A small round ring fell out.

“It’s a ring,” I said.

“It’s the Key to Bilskinir,” Tiny Doom said. “It’s made from the hair of every Haðraaða who has ever lived.”

That sounded rather disgusting to me, but she seemed pretty proud of it. She held up the ring so I could peer more closely at it. When I did, I saw that the ring was indeed made of strands of hair: blond, red, gray, black, brown, white, gold, and bright blue. The hair had been braided into one plait, and then somehow the ends of the plait had been fused to create the ring.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“I found it when I was going through Hardhands’s underwear drawer. It will open any lock in Bilskinir. I was going to use it to help me escape, but then Hardhands put me under that geas not to leave Bilskinir, so even if I unlocked the door, I couldn’t go through. But it still comes in handy sometimes.”

“Doesn’t Hardhands miss it?”

Tiny Doom grinned. “He hasn’t noticed it’s gone yet. And by the time he does, I expect to be far from here.”

She slid the ring on her index finger and then pressed the tip of her finger to the surface of the meat locker door. “The Ostium.”

The door swung open, and we stepped through into a round room not much bigger than a closet. Its windowless walls were draped in heavy tapestries, blue embroidered with silver. And it only had one door—the door we had come in by which as I turned, slammed shut behind us.

“The Ostium,” Tiny Doom said. “Bilskinir’s Secret Center. All doors in Bilskinir lead to this room and this door leads to all of Bilskinir’s rooms—if you have the Key. Lucky we have a key, huh? Now, listen, before we go on, everyone should be watching the show, but we have to be super-low-key careful, anyway. Lucky for us it’s a masked ball, so put this on.”

I caught what she tossed at me: a rubbery mask.

“It’s a chipmunk,” I said, when I had stretched the mask out. Not just any chipmunk, but a grotesquely cute bug-eyed chipmunk with a skull-like grin and cheeks as red and round as tomatoes.

“Sorry, I was in a hurry and I grabbed the first mask I could find,” she said impatiently “Here, switch with me, then, if you are too delicate to be a chipmunk.”

We switched, and I tugged on the bear mask, which was a bit soggy and smelled of wet fur, but at least it wasn’t a rodent. The eyeholes were large, and I could see surprisingly well.

Tiny Doom, now grotesquely cute, pressed the tip of her index finger against the surface of the door and said, “The Ballroom of the Battle of Califa.”

The door swung open and she made a little
follow me
gesture. We stepped out of the Ostium into the Ballroom.

Now the music was louder, a pulsating throb counterpointed by the rattling of the pictures on the wall, the porcelain in its cases, the glass in the windows. The Ballroom was empty of people but scattered with the debris of dancing: dropped fans, lost ribbons, stray garters, abandoned hankies. The fire had died down in the enormous fireplace that filled one entire wall; the long expanse of glass doors opposite were open to the night’s darkness and a fresh cool breeze.

Above the fireplace hung a huge portrait of a woman sitting in a tree swing. A sweeping black hat perched upon her wild red hair; she clutched a small terrier pup to the breast of her dark blue riding jacket, and her bare feet rested on the wide back of a mastiff the same color as her hair. The top branches of the tree were on fire, the green leaves consumed by livid orange and red flames, and behind, the sky seethed with black clouds and lightning.